Ernest Hilbert
Ernest Hilbert’s debut collection Sixty Sonnets (2009) was described by X.J. Kennedy as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America.” His second collection, All of You on the Good Earth (2013), has been hailed as a ‘wonder of a book,’ ‘original and essential,’ an example of ‘sheer mastery of poetic form,’ containing ‘some of the most elegant poems in American literature since the loss of Anthony Hecht.’ The Poetry Foundation writes that “in his debut collection, Sixty Sonnets, Hilbert establishes a variation on the sonnet form, employing an intricate rhyme scheme and varied line length. A skillful practitioner of form and nuance, Hilbert shifts between delicate sonic moments and humorous narrative sequences.”
Hilbert’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review. He attended Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City (1998-2003) and, more recently, of the Contemporary Poetry Review (2005-2010).
He hosts the popular blog and video show www.everseradio.com. He is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.
His poems are taught at a number of universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, the New School, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and Drexel University.
